You're doing great work and fulfilling your mission: creating good places and ways to grow up, to learn, to enjoy the arts, to be healthy, to work, to live. You also know that today's social problems -- unemployment, violence, intolerance, and a broken government -- limit your effectiveness. Philanthropy and nonprofits, by their very nature, are agents of a key solution to these problems: community engagement. Simply put, community engagement means involving people in solving community problems.
The late Eleanor Petersen was the founding president of Donors Forum. The Eleanor Petersen Fund for Donor-Donee Relationships was established by the board upon her retirement in 1987 after 13 years of leadership.